Bow Grip (17 page)

“My buddy Hector was just saying this morning that not having children gave you more freedom. His wife thought
childbirth enslaved women. What does that mean for lesbian parents?”

“It’s the patriarchal concept of the nuclear family that keeps people stuck in the system, not the act of child-rearing itself. It takes a village to raise a true villager.”

I looked at her sideways. “Did you learn that in art school?”

“Simone de Beauvoir, I think it was. Or maybe it was Hillary Clinton, I can’t remember.”

The sun slanted in wide beams through the window behind her. She looked good with short hair. I hugged her before I left, and she hugged me back, long and hard.

I
t wasn’t until I got outside the building and the wind hit my face that I realized I was crying. What the fuck was up with me?

I wrote with the book open in my lap in the cab of my truck, then drove straight back to the motel. Hector’s truck was missing from the parking lot. I went to my room to see if I had a message from the cello lady.

Caroline had called me back. Lenny’s wife answered the phone at the front desk and gave me the message. I was extra nice to her on the phone, since I now knew what a bastard her husband was.

I called Caroline right away.

“Caroline here.”

“Hi, it’s Joseph Cooper here. I got your number from Rupert, the uh, percussion guy at the music store? I’m looking for cello lessons. The beginner kind.”

“Hi, Joseph. What do you need to know?”

“Well, are you available over this weekend? I’m from Drumheller, and going back Monday.”

“You don’t want to ask me about my credentials?”

“Do you know how to play the cello?”

“Of course I do.”

“And can you teach me how to play?”

She let out a laugh. “Of course I can. I teach little kids in the youth orchestra.”

“Well, perfect then. That’s about my skill level, too. How much you want me to pay you?”

“Thirty bucks an hour?”

Not even half of what I charge, I thought. “Sounds good to me. How about tomorrow afternoon?”

“Come to my house at three. You got a pen?”

I wrote down the address of Caroline Daws, my new cello teacher, on the first page of my stress journal, right underneath the phone number of Cecelia Carson.

“What should I bring?”

“Just yourself and your cello.”

I hung up the phone, noticed my hands were sweating.

Stress level: minimal to none, just a bit of nerves about my first lesson. Weather: it’s cold in my motel room. Mood: the last time I can remember feeling anything even close to this was the time I got my first dirt bike, the two-stroke, the summer I turned eleven. It’s something like that, that’s as close as I can get. I’d have to call it some kind of bliss
.

I closed my stress journal. So far, the thing was really working.

I took out my cello and the library books. The tuning
fork. Flipped to the first couple pages of
How To Play a Stringed Instrument
, to ascertain once and for all just exactly how to tune the thing. I didn’t want to show up on Caroline’s doorstep totally clueless.

I started with the A string, just like the book told me to. It didn’t take me as long as I thought. Just had to feel around for it with my ears, finding the right place for the tuning peg to sit, the note, that place that made the right colour ring inside my head.

A fifth above, or a fourth below, depending on how you looked at it, the book told me. I could feel when it sounded good when I tuned the next string to the first. Like putting the roof on a house that I had just finished framing. Like finding the value of x in algebra class. I could feel my lips relax back into my face when I got it sounding right.

I put the TV on and turned it to the public broadcasting channel again, hoping for another Bollywood movie, but instead there was a yodeling program on, which I found impossible to play along with. Picked up the book again. C-G-D-A. Those were the names of the strings. Cats Go Down Alleys, it said, a rhyme to help remember it.

I wrote it down on a clean page so I wouldn’t have to bring a kids’ cello book in a clear plastic library jacket with me to my lesson tomorrow. Then I drew a sketch of my own cello, more detailed than the one in the book, with shading and shadows, and the names of all the bits, and little lines pointing, like in a parts catalogue or repair manual.

Like parts of a body. All the good ones.

I copied it straight out of my library book.

Whatever that means, I thought, but didn’t write it down. The little tin of wax stuff turned out to be rosin.

I grabbed my bow by the frog and rosined it up.

To me, sharp sounded sour, and flat sounded lukewarm. I drew the bow towards me, across the first two strings at the same time. This time they sounded dark and basement and solid. I loved how it felt, like a bottom-feeding live thing bellowing between my legs. But only if I got everything right, all at the same time. When I got it to work, I could feel my face split into a smile all on its own, like the cello was humming the bummed-out right out of me.

I wrote it down because I liked the sound of the word.

I plonked and bowed and whined around on the thing until a weird muscle under my shoulder that I never felt before began to sing in protest, and my right knee started to quake uncontrollably.

Then came Hector’s efficient triple rap at my door.

“Hello, Joseph. I haven’t interrupted you in a moment of inspiration, have I? I can come back if I have.”

“No, Hector, as a matter of fact, you’re just the man I wanted to see.”

I stashed my cello away in its case, grabbed my smokes out of my coat. Hector followed me to our little bench outside.

I closed the book in my lap. Hector was looking at me.
He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he wanted to ask.

“Sorry. Just making notes in my stress journal.” Hector sat back, waited for me to continue.

“For the shrink. She thinks it will keep me off the Prozac maybe, or whatever.”

“Am I causing you stress?”

“Not at all, Hector.”

“Glad to hear it. I keep a journal myself. Not as regular as I should, but I’ve kept it up over the years. A history of my travels, the names of the people I meet, things like that. Because you forget. You really do. That was the one thing about growing old that really snuck up on me. I thought I would always remember the things that really mattered. But that is not what happened at all. Some things I just forgot.”

Hector pulled out his tobacco pouch from the inside pocket of his suede coat.

A gentleman carries his wallet in his inside pocket
. My dad used to tell me stuff like that when I was a teenager and he was fixing my tie or explaining the finer points of cufflinks.
Only the hired help keep their wallets in their hind pockets.
Kind of ironic, I used to think, coming from a man with permanent grease worked into the cracks in his hands.
Always keep a clean handkerchief in your pocket. You never know.

Hector rolled a perfectly uniform cigarette and tossed it up, caught it between his lips. Bet he knew a couple Zippo tricks, too, I thought. I leaned over and cupped a hand against the wind as I lit his cigarette for him. “I just had a visit with the ex-wife.”

“It looks like you survived.”

“Well, Allyson had some pretty big news for me. Her and Kathleen are going to have a baby.”

“Both of them?”

“Now you see, that’s what I asked too. Just Kathleen. Two months along.”

“Are congratulations in order then? Or is her news unplanned, or unwanted?”

“They’re lesbians, Hector. They don’t get pregnant by accident. I don’t think.”

“Well, a guy shouldn’t assume anything these days.”

“True enough. Anyways, they planned it all out, I guess, because they did the artificial insemination thing.” I paused. “And they want me to co-parent.”

Hector blew smoke up into the sky around him.

“I thought you said the young lady was already two months along.”

“That’s the sperm bit, Hector, the part I can’t do, unfortunately. That’s already been taken care of. They want me to father the kid. Like, be a father. To it. With them. The three of us.”

“I see.”

“Not a sexual thing. A raise-up-the-kid-together thing.”

“I understand.”

“So spill it, Hector. What do you think? I told Ally I need to think about it. I’m asking your honest opinion.”

“The only opinion you should be concerned with is your own. You have fallen upon interesting times, Joseph. A very untraditional conundrum. What’s a man to do? It’s not as though you can ask your priest for guidance.”

“You don’t think God would frown on this, do you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. God has already done his work
- conception. Your only question should be the one you ask yourself: are you ready for this responsibility? Because you are in the rather unusual position of being able to choose. You wouldn’t be abandoning the child if you were to say no. The whole arrangement seems far more civilized than how we managed these things in my day.”

“Do you think it would be hard on the kid, though? To have three parents?”

“Right away I think about Kelly and Raylene, it seems so obvious. I can only imagine three parents are better than one, when it comes to the child. And to the woman who actually bears it, now that I think of it. But the important thing is what you want, Joseph. Allyson and the child’s mother have already cast their stones. This next bit is totally up to you, depending on what you want.”

“All I wanted since I met Ally was to raise a kid with her. To be a family.”

“Then it looks as though you might get that chance after all.”

“I didn’t imagine it going down quite like this.”

“Maybe you should have been more specific.”

“Careful what you ask for, huh?”

“Indeed.”

“So I believe I’m going to be a daddy, Hector. What do you think about that?”

“You want the truth?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“I think it’s about as romantic as a snowstorm.”

“Are snowstorms romantic?”

Hector threw the butt of his smoke on the concrete where his boot could get it, then exhaled over his shoulder.
“They certainly can be. If you come prepared for the weather.”

“I think I’m going to have to buy myself a station wagon.”

Hector smiled, put one hand on my shoulder. “That would probably be best.”

I
knocked on Cecelia Carson’s front door just after seven o’clock that night. I had showered and tried to steam the crease back into my good wool pants. Wore the blue shirt Sarah got me for my birthday that last summer, with the Sarah got me for my birthday that last summer, with the French cuffs. She said they were all the rage again. Dad’s mother-of-pearl cufflinks. I realized while I was buttoning up the collar that it was the first time I had actually put it on, which meant I hadn’t been dressed up enough to wear my new shirt since August, when I turned forty.

“Joseph. You look handsome. What’s the occasion?”

“I was out to dinner.” Which technically wasn’t a lie. I had stopped at a drive-thru on my way over. Chicken tacos. I had dressed up for chicken tacos.